


Between the shadow and the soul

by viverella



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton is an idiot, F/M, Natasha bleeds a lot, the violence is actually not so violent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-05 23:56:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1836814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Clint hesitates to call what they do dating, because they’re spies and fighters and liars and people like them aren’t meant for more than a warm body to push against in the night.</i>
</p><p>He falls in love with her and she falls in love with him and not necessarily in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the shadow and the soul

**Author's Note:**

> oh gosh I don't even know what happened to me. like I watched The Avengers forever ago and I was cool about these two and everything was good but suddenly a few weeks ago this ship just hit me so hard and now it's basically all I think about and I'm a mess. would you believe that this fic was supposed to be short? because it was. I honestly have no idea what happened, but I started writing these ridiculously out of order snippets and here we are, almost 12k words later. oops. 
> 
> also this is my first time writing about these two, so I apologize if anything feels out of character or anything. I did my best and I'm all sorts of nervous about posting my first fic about these idiots, so be kind to me please!
> 
> also also let it be known that while this fic makes references to Nat's past with the Red Room and all that, I have only read a handful of comics and background on that but I really like the idea of it so I just kind of went with it but there may be inaccuracies and this is still mostly based on MCU canon. 
> 
> titled borrowed from the Pablo Neruda poem mentioned below.

_I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,_  
_or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off._  
_I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,_  
_in secret, between the shadow and the soul._  
  
_—from Sonnet XVII, by Pablo Neruda_

 

Clint Barton learns fairly quickly that Natasha Romanov is one person he may never quite be able to figure out (it doesn’t stop him from trying though, either because he’s stupid or he likes torturing himself or both).

So when he asks Natasha, “Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?”

And she replies, “You know that I do.”

All Clint can think is, _No, no I don’t_ , because he’s been working and fighting alongside her for years now and if he’s learned anything, it’s that she’s the most difficult person to know anything about that he’s ever met. 

\---

Clint learns the way her body works before he learns how she thinks, learns the feel of her soft skin, the exact placement of all her scars from bullets and knives and worse accumulated from a long, long career as a killer, the quiet stutter of her breath when she comes apart entirely beneath him. He learns that she talks in her sleep in tense Russian before he knows which of the skeletons in her closet make the ridge of her brow furrow and her teeth clench. He knows the sensation of her heel at his throat and her fist in his gut, but not why sudden movements when she’s sick can put her on edge for hours. 

Clint constantly feels like she’s retreating away from him, carefully positioning herself between him and the closest exit no matter where or when they are, even as she lets him into her life and into her bed. 

When he wakes up in the middle of the night and she’s nowhere to be found even though he remembers falling asleep with her next to him, he’s not surprised anymore. 

Or at least, he tries not to be.

\---

The first time Natasha speaks to Clint is with a knife pressed to his throat in the sticky summer heat of an unusually hot night in Budapest. Her hair is still long then, falling in waves from the tight, neat ponytail at the top of her head, her face sharp and vicious and entirely unreadable, despite being completely exposed to him.

“Natasha Romanov?” Clint says to her, and this is supposed to be business but she’s beautiful and he’s curious.

She presses the knife into his neck and he feels it bite, feels the warm, thin trickle of blood start to drip down his neck.

“Who the fuck are you?” she hisses at him, all but spitting out the words.

Her eyes are cold and suspicious and more dangerous than anything he’s ever seen, and Clint thinks, stupidly, that in that moment, she’s the most fascinating person in the entire universe. Clint’s bow is halfway across the room and he’s out of arrows anyways, but he’s still got his pistol at his hip; he could still finish this, he thinks. He could still do his job and put a bullet in her head if he wanted to, but he finds that he doesn’t. 

Clint smiles instead and says, “You’re a hard woman to find, Ms. Romanov.”

She smiles then too, and there are daggers between her delicate lips. “I’d like to keep it that way,” she says, voice low and deceptively sweet, but the rest of her threat is drowned out by the shower of bullets that come raining through the window, and Clint finds himself wondering, even years later, what she meant to say that day. 

\---

Natasha is as much sharp edges as she is gentle curves, and sometimes, holding her is like hugging screws and nails. Sometimes, Clint doesn’t know why he can’t seem to bring himself to shake her, why he finds himself gravitating towards her like a moth to a flame. But then she smiles at him and her whole face lights up from the inside and it’s like coming back into himself again after something terrible, like waking up from a bad dream, and Clint just thinks, _Oh_. 

Three weeks after they start seeing each other (Clint hesitates to call what they do dating, because they’re spies and fighters and liars and people like them aren’t meant for more than a warm body to push against in the night), Natasha drags Clint to the bank and makes him set up a checking and investment account to start putting money away for retirement. Clint frowns at her the whole time. 

“You can’t keep stuffing all your money under your mattress like some common criminal,” she says, arm looped through his. The sun glints off of her sunglasses and she smells like the sweat pea shampoo she always uses and something sharp, like gunpowder, like danger. 

“Yeah, well I never planned on making it far enough to need retirement money,” Clint whines, knowing that he sounds childish and not caring one bit. “I was always going to die on the job in some horrific but heroic accident. Maybe saving the president or something.”

Natasha laughs, sweet and beautiful like bells, as if her childhood cover was real and she actually did become a dainty ballerina. 

“I used to think the same, but we all have to grow up eventually,” she says, sly smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She spares him a sideways glance out of the corner of her eye. “Of course, in my dreams, I always imagined I’d be killing the president, not saving him.”

Clint laughs, even though it makes something awkward ache in his chest, because here’s the thing about Natasha: she’ll make every joke in the world about her dark past but she’ll never actually say a single thing. Clint sometimes wonders if she still remembers how to let someone in. 

\---

The first time they’re assigned to work together is two months after he’d convinced her not to kill him, that he wasn’t going to kill her, that there could be more to her life than accumulating blood on her hands. Her hair is still long then, but lighter, almost strawberry blonde instead of the fiery red he remembers from Budapest. When he walks into the briefing room and Maria Hill says to him, “I assume you’re quite familiar with your new partner,” all Clint can think is, _Oh god, what have I gotten myself into?_ because Natasha looks good, really good, all polished up and dressed in one of SHIELD’s slick black combat suits, and when she smiles at him, it’s like they share a secret and a quiet little thrum shudders through Clint’s veins. 

“We’ve been acquainted,” Natasha says. Her eyes are green now instead of blue, and Clint wonders if she’s wearing contacts now or if the false front was last time they’d met (he’ll later learn that it’s never quite so simple with her). 

“Good,” Agent Hill says in her quick, efficient syllables. She slides a couple dossiers across the table to them and says, “Because you’ll only have a couple weeks to get to know one another before your first mission together.”

Clint looks over the papers in front of him. It’s just an escort job, accompanying some important someone to where he needs to be without anyone assassinating him. It’s almost too easy, as far as what Clint’s used to, and he says as much to Hill, who just raises a cool eyebrow at him. 

“This is Agent Romanov’s first mission with SHIELD,” Hill says. “She’s passed all of our evaluations with flying colors, but we couldn’t very well assign her to a top priority case right off the bat, even if this mission grates on your refined sensibilities, Agent Barton.”

Clint sighs and ignores Hill’s jab. “So it’s like a test,” he says, and it’s not a question. He knows what this is – a test of loyalties or whatever. Making sure she’s not a double agent before assigning her anything really important. He gets it, really; he just doesn’t particularly enjoy having to do these boring jobs babysitting guys he doesn’t care about. 

His displeasure must show, because Natasha smiles at him, daring and mischievous, and says, “Oh, don’t worry, Barton. I’m sure we’ll find a way to have some fun.” And then she stands, dossier in hand, and says, “The gym’s open. Let’s go a couple rounds. I want to see if you can fight without all your fancy toys.”

And Clint thinks that okay, maybe if nothing else, she’ll be interesting to work with. 

Two weeks later, after they’ve done all their research and gathered intel and Natasha has demonstrated countless times that she can very soundly kick his ass without even breaking a sweat, the job is anything but routine. Something goes wrong, and they find themselves getting ambushed, and while Clint crouches by their client, bowstring pulled taught, ready to take out anyone coming their way, he watches in amazement as Natasha launches herself right into the thick of it. At five foot four, she’s at least a good head shorter than the men attacking them, but she throws herself at them anyways with the confidence of someone who fights expecting to win. She’s got fun toys too even though she clearly doesn’t need them, taser disks and strange wrist cuffs that spit out blue shocks and a garrote that she uses to choke one of their assailants while kicking another in the gut. It’s all Clint can do to stay out of her way and just watch incredulously as she takes out almost all of their attackers with the kind of ease that can only come from a career as a killer. 

“Where the hell did you learn to fight like that?” Clint asks as he helps her drag the various unconscious bodies off to the side of the road. 

Natasha smiles at him, and if he didn’t know better, he’d think it was just a little bitter. “Ever heard of something called the Red Room?”

“Sure,” Clint says, because there’s not a spy in the world who hasn’t heard all the whispers. “Russian myth, right?”

Natasha’s eyes are dark when she straightens up and starts heading back to their car. “It’s not a myth,” she says, and she doesn’t say anything else, but she doesn’t have to; now that she’s brought it up, he can see it in the swing of her hips, in the efficient, lethal grace of her. 

“You’re a—?”

Natasha pins him with a hard look and the words _Black Widow_ die on his tongue (years later, when he drunkenly tells this story to someone – maybe Thor or Steve or someone else who makes him feel like he should be too earnest – after too many drinks and they ask him why he hadn’t known that about Natasha if she’d been his mission, he’ll shrug and say something about everything being on a need to know basis and all he’d had to know for the Budapest job was that she was dangerous and she needed to be taken out. Years later, Clint may even begin to trick himself into thinking that this is the full story and not some plan to make sure he didn’t get too curious, too invested). 

“Get in the car,” she says. “We should get going before more guys show up.”

\---

“I like your hair like this,” Clint says, nosing at Natasha’s newly red hair. She’d come over a couple hours ago, takeout in hand and hair dyed a couple shades darker than it’d been when they’d first met, curls falling to just beneath her shoulders. 

Natasha laughs softly. She’s settled comfortably between his legs, leaning back on his bare chest and reading a book, something Italian, something about a man trying to find the ending to a story and accidentally running to the ends of the earth in the meantime, accidentally finding a woman. 

“What, curled?” she says, and her face is turned down to her book, but he can hear the smile on her lips. “You know my hair is naturally curly, right?”

Clint rolls his eyes and nips at her pale shoulder. “I meant red,” he says, quiet. 

She laughs softly and tips her head back to rest on his shoulder. 

“Yeah well I was ready for a change and Fury thought it’d be a good idea for my next mission. Red’s memorable,” she says, as if changing identities was as easy as changing clothes (“If you call me in the next few months, do me a favor and call me Natalie, okay?” she’d said earlier as she’d ducked into the bathroom to borrow his shower, and he’d known then that this change meant undercover work and undercover work meant extended time away from him). 

“Tony Stark like redheads?” Clint asks, trying to sound casual. 

Natasha shifts so she can shoot him a playful look and marks her spot in her book with her finger. 

“Is this jealousy I detect, Agent Barton?” she teases. 

Clint scowls at her and presses his face into the curls rolling down the top of her back. He feels her laugh again and she resettles herself against him. 

“My mission is intel and assessment,” she says, instead of something like _don’t worry_ or _you have nothing to be afraid of_. “I hardly think I need to sleep with Stark to accomplish that.” 

They’re quiet for a moment and Clint feels something they haven’t ever talked about shift and settle between them. 

“Would you like me to read to you?” Natasha asks, voice soft, and it would almost be an apology if they’d both let it. 

“My Italian’s a bit rusty,” Clint says. 

She smiles and says gently, “It’ll be a good refresher, then.”

She reads to him quietly until he falls asleep, her voice rolling easily over the round vowels and curling consonants of Italian like it’s the only language she’s ever known. In a way, Clint supposes, it could be, if she wanted it to. 

\---

The first time they sleep together is after a mission in Singapore turns into an extended vacation in Hong Kong. SHIELD owes them both something like a week off after the work they’ve put in for the Singapore job, and Clint’s never been to Hong Kong and Natasha thinks that’s a tragedy. Natasha speaks Cantonese as easily as she speaks Russian or English or French, and Clint wonders if there’s a language in the world that she doesn’t know. They’ve been working together for almost five months now. Clint still hasn’t beaten her in a fight. 

Natasha spends the first two days dragging Clint all over the city, feeding him food he’s never tried before and pointing out the places that she remembers from the last time she was here, the places that she doesn’t. On the third night, they wind up in a bar downtown that an old friend of hers recommended, and she drinks him under the table. 

“I’m Russian,” she says cheerfully, eyes glassy and bright as they stumble back to their hotel. “If there’s one thing we know, it’s how to handle our alcohol.”

And then stumbling turns into leaning too much into each other as they ride the hotel elevator up to their floor and that turns into her pushing him up against the door to his room, mouth hot and eager on his. 

“I’m too old for you,” Clint manages to gasp out, because he’s getting closer to forty than thirty these days and she’s only in her twenties. 

Natasha laughs, something harsh and sour beneath the lightness of it. 

“No,” she says, and he can feel her mouth move against his when she talks, making him feel too warm all over. “ _I’m_ too old for _you_. I’ve been killing since before you were even born.”

She opens his door with the key she’d apparently taken from his pocket when he wasn’t paying attention and pushes him inside. 

“But—” Clint stammers, because he’s seen her file, knows what her story is as far as it hasn’t been redacted and it’s not much, but he remembers seeing something like 1984 written in as her birth year. 

“Never believe everything you read in official records, Barton,” she says, nudging him backwards until the backs of his knees hit the bed. “I’ve been in my twenties for decades.” 

She falls into bed with him easily, beautiful and dangerous and wanting him, and he remembers hearing the rumors about the Russian super soldier program, the Red Room, the girls who would be young for years and years, kept in their prime age for unforeseen wars in the future. And then she’s yanking his pants off and tossing her own clothing aside and moving to bite at Clint’s neck while shoving her hand into his boxers, aggressive and rough and everything Clint didn’t know he’d been dreaming of for months now, and he forgets how to think altogether. 

\---

Natasha has had a key to Clint’s apartment since six weeks into working with him when he’d overslept and missed a briefing and sparring practice and she’d had to take the heat from Hill and Fury for the both of them. She’d broken into his apartment that day and carefully moved all of his furniture (including the bed that he was still sleeping in, what the _hell_ , who does that?) two inches to the left before stealing his spare key and emergency handgun from under the sink. He’d spent nearly that entire day stumbling around his apartment and running into everything before he’d found the note she’d left him underneath several books that he’d had stacked up on a table and never read ( _Sleep through briefing again and I’ll steal your precious arrows next time, asshole._ ). It hadn’t been signed but he’d started setting alarms to wake him up for important things anyways and threw out all the food in his apartment later that day because he wasn’t sure what she’d touched and what she hadn’t. 

“Hey,” Natasha says, letting herself into his apartment a few hours after he gets back from a mission in Brazil. “How was São Paulo?” 

“Hot,” Clint says, digging through the pile of mail that’s accumulated in his absence, wondering if there’s anything important he’s missed. 

She’s let her hair grow out again in the months since what people are now calling the Battle of New York and when he glances over at her, he finds that she’s started straightening it while he’s been away. He likes the curls better, but it still looks nice. He wonders if there’s ever going to be a time when he returns from a trip and doesn’t notice anything different about her. 

“I got you something,” Clint offers, and when she smiles, something strange and uncomfortable seizes in his chest. 

Natasha walks over to him and shoves his mail aside so she can sit on the couch next to him, throwing her legs over his lap. 

“Oh?” she says absently, pressing a finger to the healing cut at the junction of his of his neck and his shoulder. She frowns. 

Clint hands her a thin black box, watching as she slips the ribbon off of it and tips it open. She lets out a surprised, pleased laugh when she sees the delicate necklace nestled inside, the one he’d spent hours looking for, weaving in and out of little Brazilian artisan shops until he found something he thought Natasha would like. 

“An arrow?” Natasha says, bright and happy but always, always teasing. “Could you be any more cliché?”

Clint wraps an arm around her waist and presses his lips to her hair. “In case I ever make good on that death wish of mine,” he says, ignoring her attempts to poke fun at him. He reaches into the box to lift the necklace out and help her put it on. “Do you like it?”

She looks down and fiddles with where the arrow rests between her collarbones. Her lips press together into a crooked smile like she doesn’t want to let it get away from her. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do.”

\---

The first time Clint tells Natasha that he loves her is eight months after they start sleeping together. These days, Natasha only spends the night one or two nights out of the week, even though they meet up for dinner and drinks and maybe a movie almost every evening. Clint has only seen the inside of her apartment once, when she made him make a stop there so she could pick up a few things on their way to the airport for a mission. She always comes over to his place when she wants to see him, coming and going like a cat. 

The first time Clint tells Natasha that he loves her is after a mission goes horrifyingly, disastrously wrong. Clint’s not exactly sure what happened, because one moment he’d been fine, patrolling the perimeter of the complex where a terror cell was suspected to be hiding out, and the next, everything went up in flames, the smell of smoke filling his lungs and the rooftop he’d been standing on shaking and then giving away beneath him. Clint remembers gunfire and Natasha’s sharp voice in his ear, half a note higher than he’s used to hearing from her, remembers being dragged out at some point and Natasha shouting at him to stay awake and Natasha’s surprisingly strong hands bright red with blood ( _his_ blood, he realizes when he wakes) and Natasha and Natasha and Natasha. 

When he wakes up, she’s sitting in an uncomfortable looking chair next to his bed, elbows on her knees and head bowed, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a loose tank top. One of her hands is bandaged up halfway to the elbow and she’s got the beginnings of bruises already blooming all over her pale skin and no doubt has many more unseen wounds covered up under her clothing. She looks over at him when she hears him stir, her expression pinched and concerned, and when she tips her head upwards, he can see stitches crawling their way from just below her hairline to her left eyebrow. 

“Hey,” he croaks out, voice hoarse from smoke and sleep. 

She offers him an almost pained smile. “Hey,” she says quietly. “How do you feel?”

Clint looks down at himself, at the bandages wrapped around his torso and various appendages, feels the medical tape holding together cuts on his face. His side aches and he’s willing to guess that he’s probably cracked at least a couple ribs, and he feels groggy, probably from the medication and whatever fresh trauma his body has recently endured, but otherwise intact. 

“Surprisingly okay,” he says, smiling, hoping to get a laugh out of her. 

Natasha lets out a soft sigh instead. “That’ll be the morphine talking,” she tells him, mouth set in a concerned line. 

Clint lets his shoulders sag. Leave it to her to take everything too seriously. He’s had worse than this before; he knows he’ll pull through just like he has every time. If nothing else, Clint Barton is a survivor, and it’s going to take a lot more than some terrorists and a little bit of fire to take him out. 

Clint holds his arm out and wiggles his fingers, beckoning her closer. Natasha raises an eyebrow at him but gets out of her chair slowly to come over and sit gingerly on the edge of the hospital bed. He keeps wiggling his fingers until she cracks a smile and takes his hand in hers. 

“That’s better,” he mumbles, and he’s not quite sure what he’s even saying, speaking as if talking through water. 

He blinks slowly at Natasha. Her hair is falling out of the loose bun at the top of her head and it keeps slipping in front of her eyes, making her look tired and disheveled in a way that Clint hardly ever sees, despite how many nights they’ve spent together at this point. Clint wonders if she’s been home to sleep or if she’s been waiting here all this while for him to wake up. He wonders which possibility he wants more. 

“Thanks for pulling me out,” Clint says, and his mouth feels sluggish. “My last partner—God, he was such an asshole. He’d probably have left me there to die, y’know. Not you though. You’re probably the best partner I’ve ever had.”

And he’s mostly just rambling now, the nonsense words of a drug-addled mind slipping out against his will, but Natasha’s smiling at him like he’s something ridiculous, fond and soft and only a little bit pitying, and it makes Clint feel like his chest could explode. 

“I’m serious, Nat. You’re really something, you know that?” he says, and she laughs and tucks her hair behind her ear, green eyes light and warm despite the weary lines around her eyes. She’s beautiful, the way a solar eclipse is beautiful, painful to look at for too long, and Clint doesn’t ever want to work with anyone else. He means to say as much, but his mouth moves around his next words without meaning to and he finds himself saying, very seriously, “Nat, I fucking love you.”

Natasha goes very still and something restrained and guarded settles on her face like a mask. She doesn’t let go of his hand though and after a long moment offers up a smile again, but this one feels more private, more careful. 

“Get some rest, Clint,” she says quietly, moving to push his hair back. Her fingers feel soothing running through his hair, and he’s suddenly very sleepy. “Doctor’s orders.”

“You too,” he hears himself mumble as he closes his eyes and drifts off, Natasha’s hand still in his. 

Later, when he checks out of the hospital and Natasha drives him home and makes him soup and yells at him not to move too much lest he pull his stitches out, neither of them talk about the conversation. Clint figures she’s giving him a free pass, chalking it all up to the drugs doing weird things to his head. And something foreign and terrifying wells up in his throat every time he thinks about it, so he’s more than happy to just leave it at that. 

\---

Paris in the spring is supposed to be beautiful, and Clint thinks about taking a weekend’s vacation there after he finishes up some business in London. He wonders, absently, if Natasha would meet him there if he asked. It’s more than a year after they started sleeping together, and Natasha keeps a spare toothbrush in Clint’s bathroom now. 

“You have things to do in Europe in a couple months, right?” Clint asks her one morning as she untangles her hair after a shower. He leans against the bathroom counter next to her as she frowns at her reflection. 

“Yeah, Fury’s sending me to Geneva,” Natasha says vaguely.

“Ever been to Paris in the spring?” Clint asks, trying not to sound too hopeful. 

“Years ago,” she says, because of course she’s been there. Natasha’s been everywhere. “It’s nice.”

Clint ignores the heavy feeling in his chest, like he was hoping she’d answer otherwise, and presses on, “Nice enough for you to want to go again?”

Natasha meets his eyes through the mirror and raises an eyebrow at him. “What, like a vacation?” she asks and somehow manages to make it sound like he’s offended her in some way. “Like Hong Kong?”

Clint shrugs and hopes that he doesn’t look too invested in the situation. He wonders why it feels so important to him that she agrees to it. It’s not like they’ve taken a trip together like this since Hong Kong anyways. 

Natasha sighs like there’s something he’s not getting and when she smiles, it’s a little of what Clint would almost call sad, except that it’s coming from her. She leans her hip on the counter and turns to look at him properly. 

“You and I, Clint, we can’t—We’re not the type of people to be in the business of making promises like that,” she says like it should be obvious, and it’s times like this that Clint remembers how long her long career in espionage has been. She must see Clint’s expression fall, because her smile shifts into something warmer and she touches a light hand to his arm. “I’m just saying; what if something doesn’t go as planned in Geneva? Or London? What if one of us has to run? People like us, we can’t afford to make plans for the future like that. It’s not practical.”

And the thing is, Clint doesn’t want practical, has never wanted practical, but he wants her, wants her so badly that his bones ache with the weight of it sometimes on the nights she’s not there. He nods and looks away. 

“Yeah,” he says, voice carefully level. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

\---

What Clint thinks of when he thinks of Budapest is different from what he thinks Natasha thinks about. 

Natasha probably thinks of the rush of the fight, the feeling of bodies dropping beneath her capable hands like flies, all adrenaline and fire and her pulling herself out alive by the skin of her teeth, hell-bent on surviving and so, so very alive with the nonstop blur of it all. 

Clint thinks about the acrid taste of gunpowder in his mouth, the kick of his pistol in his hand, scrambling for purchase and watching her save the both of them like it's all she knows how to do, feeling too exposed without a quiver full of arrows and reeling in shock, not expecting to make it till morning. 

When Natasha shouts at him through the smoke and debris of battle in New York, “It’s just like Budapest all over again,” the corners of her mouth are ever so slightly curved up into a smile that you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it (but after all this time, Clint knows what to look for, sees the slight glint in her eye as clear as day).

Natasha says Budapest and Clint’s suddenly brought back to that hotel room and the heat of summer and learning what it meant to fear something beautiful, and it makes him feel nothing exciting like her face makes it seem like it is, just raw and desperate, so he screws his face up and fires off another arrow at the Chitauri and shouts back, “You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

In the rumble and mess of battle, Natasha has no time to see the bitter edge to his expression, and that suits Clint just fine.

\---

Clint is in Eastern Europe when HYDRA is exposed and SHIELD falls. He’s in deep cover when it happens, three months into infiltrating a human trafficking ring, and a heavy beard sits on his face, catching him off guard with how unlike him it is every time he sees his own reflection. When SHIELD falls, his cover falls, his carefully arranged false identity crumbling in a matter of hours as all of SHIELD’s secrets are spilled onto the internet. He makes it out, but only barely and not before getting shot in his thigh and almost getting his left hand sliced off, and he has to call up too many favors just to get back to America because his original extraction plan is completely useless now that SHIELD’s been compromised. 

Clint spends his entire first week back sitting around his apartment glued to his laptop under the pretense of recovering from the hell he went through after his cover fell through. He spends his days scouring the internet for any and all information regarding what happened, because there’s no one around to tell him the real story anymore, and watches footage of three helicarriers crumbling out of the sky and plummeting into the Potomac with his heart in his throat, hoping that Natasha didn’t somehow get herself in the middle of it all and fall with them. 

He knows that Natasha’s been working more with Steve lately, knows that Steve’s up to his elbows in all of this, knows that Natasha wouldn’t be the type to cut her losses and run if she’d gotten swept up in it. And he knows that Natasha’s gone off the grid, disappeared as if she never existed in the first place, which must mean that she was in pretty deep too, which means that she could be in serious danger and Clint wouldn’t even know. 

A quick call to Tony confirms that she’s on the run, that she left without saying goodbye to much of anyone, that Steve was the one who told Tony not to get too worried if he didn’t hear from either of them for a while and to tell anyone who came asking what’s happened. Turns out that Steve’s run off too, on some wild goose chase trying to find a ghost from his past, and when Clint hangs up the phone, he’s left reeling in the wake of it all. Without SHIELD and all the people he’s grown used to having in his life, anchoring him down, Clint’s not sure where he stands or what he’s supposed to do. Clint finds himself wishing, irrationally, even as he discovers every cover of hers that he knows about and some that he didn’t, that Natasha could be here, because she’s good at this, at picking up the pieces, and she was the one who helped him figure out how to be him again last time, when Loki had opened his head up and played with what he found. Clint isn’t sure he can figure out where everything fits anymore on his own. He hasn’t had the practice in years now. 

Maria Hill drops by his apartment at the end of his first week back in America. She raises his eyebrows at his generally haphazard state but otherwise doesn’t comment on how much of a mess he looks like. 

“Hope you’re still up to field work,” she says instead of asking if he’s okay. 

“SHIELD’s gone,” Clint says as he steps aside and lets her into his apartment. “What the hell do you need me for?”

“Fury’s gone underground,” Hill tells him, and the way she says it, he gets the feeling that only a handful of people know that Fury’s even alive. “He’s left Coulson as Director in the meantime. We’re working on building SHIELD from the ground up again and we don’t have a lot of manpower. We could use your help.”

Clint sighs and scrubs a hand over his face, all exhaustion and frayed nerves. “Yeah,” he says, because if Natasha were here, she’d tell him to find a way to make himself useful, to find something he knows to ground him. “Yeah, okay. What do you need?”

\---

The second time Clint tells Natasha that he loves her, he has a concussion and it’s Christmas and Natasha’s spending the night because he’s shit at taking care of himself when he gets hurt. They order Indian food and watch holiday specials on TV and even though he probably shouldn’t, Clint drinks too much eggnog and winds up curled up on the couch, head in Natasha’s lap and crying as the people in Central Park sing Christmas songs to power Santa’s sleigh and save Christmas at the end of _Elf_. 

Natasha ends up having to all but carry him to his bed, wrestling with his sluggish, clumsy limbs to get him undressed. Clint watches her fuss about him with the sort of rapt fascination that comes along with the general territory of being very, very drunk. She raises an eyebrow at him as she strips out of her own clothing and tosses on one of Clint’s soft, purple t-shirts to sleep in. 

“What?” she asks, crawling into bed next to him and shoving him over so that he’s not lying diagonally across the entire mattress. 

Clint reaches over to her and means to brush her hair back behind her ear, means for it to be tender and heartfelt, but finds that he lacks the coordination to properly do so and ends up sort of awkwardly petting her hair instead. 

“Thanks,” he says. He smiles and thinks absently that it must look loopy and exaggerated in his drunk, exhausted state. “You always take such good care of me.”

She rolls her eyes at him and pulls the comforter up over the both of them, curling her small frame easily into the concave space of his chest. 

“Go to sleep, Clint,” she murmurs into the curve of his neck. 

Clint wraps his arms around her, reveling in the delicate feel of her body pressed against his, the small, quiet power of her. She smells like the gingerbread cookies she’d brought him when she picked him up from the hospital, the scent of it in her hair like she baked the cookies herself, and her thin fingers are rubbing gentle, soothing circles into his hip. She’s the most dangerous person he knows and her eyelashes flutter against his neck as she lets her eyes slip shut, and Clint finds himself thinking that if he were to die like this, right now, he’d probably be pretty okay with that, because Natasha makes him feel more at home than he can ever remember feeling in his entire life. Natasha makes him feel like he belongs.

“I love you,” he mumbles into her hair, so quietly that he hardly remembers it in the morning.

In his arms, Natasha tenses, fingers stilling against his skin, but then she relaxes again in a movement so rehearsed that Clint doesn’t know what to do. She inches herself closer in the circle of his arms and lets out a long breath like a sigh but doesn’t say anything. A moment later, she’s asleep, and Clint eventually drifts off with Christmas carols in his head, wondering how much of it he really meant. 

\---

Clint comes back into himself after Natasha smashes his head into a metal rod with Loki’s voice still ringing through his skull, Loki’s lies swimming around in his mind alongside Clint’s own thoughts, making it hard to figure out what’s real and what isn’t. Everything feels too vivid, too sharp, and Natasha sits a careful five feet away from him, elbows on her knees, eyes hard, murmuring, “Clint, you’re going to be alright.”

Clint lashes out at her, a metallic taste on his tongue, still more Loki than himself, and she doesn’t even flinch, just coaxes him through it, pulling on the loose threads of him until he starts to feel warm again, feels his heart start to settle in his ribcage, no longer frantic like a wild animal. He drinks the water she’s laid out for him and she talks about wading into war, and Clint wonders what happened to the two of them, when things got this violent and desperate (but then, he thinks, he’s never seen the two of them in the middle of something so big). Clint makes a joke about putting an arrow through Loki’s eye socket just to see her smile, the quiet, subtle thing like she doesn’t know how to let herself go. She does, but it’s more pained than he likes, more hesitant like she’s as unsure of herself as he is. It’s an unfamiliar look on her, and Clint feels it deep in his gut, hates the way it twists her mouth.

“What did Loki do to you?” he asks, because he sees her frayed edges like he hardly ever does. He can see where she’s worn down to the bone, where Loki’s claws have caught and pulled, and he doesn’t like the sight of it, so many of her scars from her unspoken years in Russia laid out in front of him. 

“He didn’t, I just—” Natasha hesitates, frowns, pressing her lips together and looking away from him. Her arm’s brushing against his as they sit next to each other on the recovery room cot, but it feels like she’s trying to pull away somehow, uncomfortable in her own skin. 

Clint shifts his weight minutely, and their knees bump together lightly. He can hear the things that Loki whispered in his head, the thoughts Loki shoved into his skull, and he can hear Natasha’s voice as if she was talking to him and not Loki in that cell, and Clint’s still not sure if it’s a real thing that happened or if it’s just some false memory that Loki made up to rip another hole in the team that’s only just beginning to form. But he can hear her voice ringing through his head over and over and over again and he can’t get it to stop – _love is for children; I owe him a debt_.

“Natasha,” Clint gasps out, barely a breath, a heavy ache settling in his chest that he can’t name. 

She looks wounded, but privately, and he imagines that he probably looks desperate, openly, and he wonders if these are the people they’re going to become when this is all over. He frantically hopes that they’ll find each other again like they did after Budapest, after Hong Kong, after all the running and gunfire and false identities. 

“I’ve been compromised,” Natasha says finally, and Clint hates the way her voice breaks just perceptibly around the words. She frowns and Clint hears her next words overlapping with the maybe-memory bouncing around his head, “I got red in my ledger. I’d like to wipe it out.”

It sounds mechanical, rehearsed, but when the battle’s all over and Tony drags them out for shawarma, Natasha lets Clint prop his leg up on her chair and leans her weight back on him, her eyes glued to him the whole time, heavy and calculating but calmer now, gentle in a way that he’s only just started to notice in the moments between when she thinks he’s paying attention. And even later, when the finally let themselves get checked up by the SHIELD medical crew they avoided earlier, she picks gravel and stray glass shards out of his hair and frowns at the cuts and bruises coloring his skin when the medical team strips him out of his combat suit, and if Clint were to close his eyes and imagine hard enough, it could almost be like it’s any other mission. Clint knows it’s not like that when it comes down to it, that this is wildly different from anything they’ve ever been through, but when Natasha crosses her arms and tells him not to move so much so the medical crew can do their fucking job, something familiar settles in Clint’s chest for the first time since the Tesseract spat Loki out. 

\---

Most of Clint’s work for SHIELD after the disaster in Washington DC consists of combing through personnel files and conducting interviews and finding the handful of SHIELD agents and analysts and technicians who have made it through this whole ordeal without HYDRA staining their hands. It’s monotonous, dull work, but it’s the most important thing on the table on the moment, so besides the occasional day out sucking up to old SHIELD connections to smooth out wrinkles that the whole situation with HYDRA caused, trying to build something reputable out of the wreckage, this is Clint’s life. Desk work. Shuffling papers. Boring but necessary. 

Clint’s coming out of one of these meetings one day, feeling stiff and awkward in the suit that he’s only worn a few times before and carrying a nice leather briefcase that he unearthed from some dark corner of his apartment that he brought along to look a little more like he’s actually supposed to be doing this sort of work. It’s been months since SHIELD crashed and burned and Natasha disappeared, edging on a year. Clint hasn’t heard from her ever since the night before he flew out for Eastern Europe, when she was laughing at him from the mess of his bed, hair a loose tangle, throwing a pillow at his retreating back and jokingly shouting at him not to find another Russian girl to run off with. Not that he’s expected to hear from her until the dust begins to settle. Maybe a letter as her new identity starts taking shape. Maybe a phone call from an anonymous number when she’s getting closer to making her way back to America through several countries all over the world. 

He’s expecting the news to trickle in when she starts to carve out a space for herself again, which is why he’s so shocked when he walks out of his meeting, pulling at his tie, and he hears the voice he’d recognize anywhere ring out in his ears, “You look nice. Why don’t you dress up for me more often?”

Clint’s head snaps up so quickly he’s afraid that he might get whiplash, terrified that he’s imagining things, but there she is, leaning against a street sign at the corner of the street, sunlight glinting off of her sunglasses, a beat up duffle bag at her feet. She’s wearing one of her customary leather jackets and her arms are crossed and a smile is toying at her mouth like she never left, like it was just yesterday that she was poking light jabs at him over breakfast. Her cheeks are sunken and her posture holds too much exhaustion in it and her already small frame looks thinner than he’s ever seen her, but she’s here and she’s smiling at him and she’s real. 

Clint drops the briefcase in his hand and forgets about everything else he was meant to be doing today, and he finds himself running without remembering thinking it. He finds himself running towards her and suddenly she’s in his arms, tiny and delicate and still he can feel the trapped power in her. He holds her as tightly as he can, pressing his face into her hair (cropped short again and darker now, almost auburn instead of her natural red), and she smells like what damp earth smells like after a heavy rain and that perpetual scent of gunpowder, like it’s seared under her skin, and Clint’s trying to cling onto it all so hard that his hands are shaking. 

“Natasha,” he breathes out without exactly knowing what he’s saying, just that there’s this raw, anxious ache in his chest that’s suddenly burst wide open and he can’t hold onto the pieces of him tightly enough. “Oh my god, Natasha. Natasha. _Natasha._ ”

“Oh,” Natasha says quietly in surprise, and then her small hands slowly come up to stroke his back softly, like she knows the kind of torture it’s been trying to press on and not knowing where she stood. “Hey, Clint, hey, it’s okay. I’m here. I’m home.”

And Clint wants to believe her, wants to think that this is a place that she’d actually like to call home, but he’s known her for enough years to know that home isn’t a reality for her. Home is where each of her new identities takes her. Home is ephemeral. Home is not always with him.

But later, after Natasha’s showered and eaten something and looks a little less spacey around the eyes, she asks, “Hey, can I stay with you for a while? My old place sort of got… given away after my covers leaked and my landlord found out who I really am.”

Clint finds himself agreeing, frowning at her single duffle bag stuffed full of only the practical things – a few changes of clothing and tactical gear and several clearly stolen files stamped _CLASSIFIED_ in red lettering. Clint’s still only been to her apartment once or twice, but he remembers delicate floral curtains and beautiful souvenirs from all over the world and a colorful quilt thrown over the couch that looked like it might’ve been handmade. Clint wonders what’s become of it all, the reminders of Natasha’s long life. Clint wonders if the last personal thing that Natasha has left is the arrow necklace he bought her in Brazil, the thin chain still hanging precariously around her neck.

“What happened to your stuff?” Clint asks. 

They’re sitting out on the fire escape and watching the sky slowly fade from burning orange to cool, calm black. 

Natasha shrugs. “Took everything important with me,” she says, and in this light, her green eyes look dark and lost. “The rest of it’s just… stuff. It’s just junk.”

“Everyone needs their junk,” Clint says, thinking of the boxes of things he refuses to throw away, the old Christmas lights in knots that he can’t untangle, broken arrows snapped in half, and most of it’s just useless crap that people tend to accumulate through life, but it’s his stuff and it makes him feel more at home to have it all there. 

Natasha laughs, and for a long moment, she doesn’t say anything. Clint almost begins to wonder if she was laughing at him when she says quietly, “Maybe you’re my junk, Barton. Can’t seem to ever get rid of you anyways.”

And Clint doesn’t even know what she means by that. 

\---

Natasha meets him in Paris in the spring. She’s dressed in a light sundress and a wide brimmed hat and circular sunglasses, sitting in the grass across the street from the Eiffel Tower and watching as the lights gradually flick on in the darkening evening. She’s drinking red wine straight from the bottle and she looks unwound and unhurried for once and so startlingly French that Clint almost doesn’t notice her. 

“You’re late,” Natasha says in perfect, elegant French. 

Clint laughs as he sits down next to her. The grass is warm from a day baking in the sun, and Natasha leans a little on his side as she passes him the bottle of wine.

“Didn’t know you’d be waiting,” he says in less perfect but still passable French, bringing the bottle up to his lips and taking a long sip. The wine is fruity on his tongue, something heavy and smoky settling underneath, and it tastes like summer. 

Natasha watches him drink, studies his face over the top of her sunglasses for a long moment before she laughs, something warm and oddly sincere running down the back of her throat. Natasha laughs a lot but hardly ever so openly and genuinely like this. Clint wonders if it’s the wine.

“Clint Barton,” she says in English now, because her English is always sharper than any other language except Russian, though her words sound just a touch too fond to be a real jab at him. “You idiot.”

\---

The third time Clint tells Natasha he loves her is when they’re on an Avengers mission storming the base of a HYDRA sleeper cell. Clint keeps to the fringes as usual, eyes sharpest when he’s removed from the immediacy of the fight, and Natasha breaks in from underground with Steve, a quiet trust between the two of them that wasn’t there back in New York, the first time they fought together. Tony takes the south entrance with Bruce and Thor’s got the north entrance with Sam, that guy that Steve brought back with him when he stopped running all over the world, his ghost nowhere to be found. 

It’s supposed to be easy, smooth sailing for a team as highly skilled as them. It’s supposed to be in and out. 

Instead, Clint hears a sudden burst of gunfire crackle through his earpiece and a gasp and Steve’s voice shout, loud and scared, “Natasha!”

And that’s all Clint needs before he’s running, because the perimeter is basically secured anyways and this HYDRA group is isolated, meaning that if their intel was right, there shouldn’t be any huge amount of backup coming that Clint would need to take out before they reach the complex. Clint’s running and not even thinking about it, not even thinking about the possibility that he could get shot too, his breath hitching uncomfortably in his throat as he tries to remember how to breathe evenly enough to keep propelling his body forwards. 

Natasha’s lying in a pool of blood when he catches up to her, holding her stomach together where the bleeding’s the most urgent. Steve’s barking out commands on the communication line, and Clint vaguely hears him calling the backup crew they have on standby for a medical team and telling Sam to drop back and hold the perimeter, but Clint can barely hear anything for the roar in his ears, the sight of Natasha so pale, of so much of her blood. He’s never seen her like this, so close to death he can taste it in his mouth, and she looks so unnaturally small that Clint thinks that maybe he’s never known real fear after all. 

“Natasha,” he says in a rush, crouching down next to her and pressing his hand on top of hers, trying to put more pressure on the wound, trying to stop the life from leaking out of her. “Fuck, Natasha. Jesus Christ.”

Her breathing is rapid and shallow and as she lets out a sickeningly wet cough, her eyelids begin to flutter. Clint shakes her shoulder roughly with his other hand until she pries her eyes open again.

“C’mon, Nat, stay with me now,” he says, feeling himself start to make promises he could never hope to keep, unable to stop the words from streaming out. “Just stay awake, yeah? You’re going to make it. You’re going to survive. That’s who we are, right? Survivors? You’re _going_ to make it, Nat. Just hang on.”

Natasha spits out a mouthful of blood and looks like she would say something, the words sharp and playful on the tip of her tongue, if she weren’t saving her strength to keep herself conscious, and Natasha never gives up and she’s never weak, but Clint can see her surprisingly warm vitality fading slowly from her eyes even as he watches, helpless. 

“Nat?” Clint says, desperate now. He reaches out and cups her face in his hand, runs his thumb over the strong curve of her jaw. Every one of his careful stops and guards are breaking down in the very real possibility of her death, right now in his arms, because they fight alongside super soldiers and gods but the two of them are not like the rest. The two of them are small and sleek and breakable compared to the rest of them, and Clint has never been more aware of that fact as he cries out frantically, “Nat, come on, don’t do this to me. I can’t—I don’t know how to do this anymore without you. You disappeared for almost a year after DC, and it was—I couldn’t—” Clint catches himself, shifts, says, more honest than he means, “You are the worst kind of person to love, you know that? Because I’m in love with you and I know we’ve never talked about it, but I meant it the first time I said it and the second time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve always been in love with you, since Hong Kong, since Budapest even, and you are the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me and you don’t even realize and you can’t just—You are _not_ going to die on me, not today, not like this, Nat. Do you hear me? You and I, we’re not going to die on the job, right? That’s not the plan anymore, remember?”

And he’s rambling and terrified and more distraught than he can ever remember feeling and everything he’s ignored and missed and thought about only in the quiet safety of darkness comes spilling out, messy and unplanned, just like everything about him. This new fear of Natasha slipping right through his fingers like this is more than the fear of Natasha rebuffing him, more than the imagined conversations in his head in which Natasha places a gentle hand on his chest and says softly, coolly, _Come on, Clint, you know we’re not that type of people_. It’s just that he’s lived so long in sync with her (what is it, nearing eight years now? Nine?), letting himself fall into her life and letting her fall into his, always finding each other after months away, the familiarity and shocking intimacy of it all, that he feels off balance just thinking about the possibility of having to do all this without her to scoop him up at the end of the day and roll her eyes at his bad habits and fuss over him when he gets injured. She hasn’t found a new apartment yet and she’s already starting to accumulate things of her own all over Clint’s apartment and Clint feels it in his gut like he’s been shot too imagining the vast emptiness of the bed next to him if Natasha were suddenly absent. 

Natasha blinks at him, slowly through the encroaching coldness in her limbs, and laughs, a thick cough of blood and something light and fond and only a little pitying. 

“Clint Barton, you idiot,” she says, barely audible over the whir of the unmarked ambulance that just arrived, and the way she says it, it’s like she’s keeping her end of some promise she’s never made. “That was never the plan.”

And before Clint can fully process what she’s trying to say to him in the spaces between her words, she’s being pulled away from him and loaded up into the ambulance and sped away. Clint blinks, the sudden silence ringing in his ears. His hands are red with Natasha’s blood. 

Natasha’s voice crackles through his ear one more time before the medical crew pulls her communication line out. “Do your fucking job, Barton,” she rasps through what Clint thinks is supposed to be a laugh, and then the line goes dead. 

After a moment, Steve slings his shield across his back and says, “Come on.”

Clint thinks he would’ve jumped in surprise if that instinct hadn’t been trained out of him years and years ago. He’d forgotten that Steve was even there, that any of the others were counting on him to do what he does best, and he feels guilty for letting himself get so unprofessional in the middle of a job. He’s better than this. He is. 

Steve’s eyes are gentle and understanding, the weight of knowing what it means to lose someone so important, and he says kindly, “Come on, you heard her. We have a job to do.”

He’s right, and Clint follows him deeper into the HYDRA base, body twisting almost on autopilot to avoid stray bullets and take down those who attack them. The whole time, his mind is still on the pool of blood they’d left behind in that corridor, so much of it, the color still caught under his fingernails. 

\---

When they leave New York along with the other Avengers after Loki is whisked away, the group of them scattering to the various corners of the universe to reorganize themselves into some semblance of normalcy, Natasha lets Clint drive. It’s a SHIELD car and the vague idea that the two of them could drop entirely off the grid together to pick up the pieces is probably too much to hope for, but Natasha kicks her feet up on the dashboard and rolls down her window to stick her hand out and catch the wind and says something about going somewhere quiet.

She murmurs directions to him and they wind up somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Vermont at some sleepy little bed and breakfast in an equally sleepy town, and when they get a room, the woman at the front desk recognizes Natasha and greets her by name, only calls her Audrey instead of Natasha. Clint sees the mask slip into place, sees Audrey fall over Natasha like a ripple in water, her movements softer and more hesitant, smiles more open and inviting. Audrey stays securely in place, laughing delicately, until the woman who probably owns the place shows them to their room and then slips off, going to tend to other business. When Natasha surfaces again, her smile as she waves Clint into the room is smaller and more private, and it makes Clint’s gut clench in a way that he doesn’t like to think about. 

“Didn’t know places like this were your thing,” he says instead, looking out the window at the dense green all around them. 

Natasha shrugs and drops the duffle bag she’d brought on the ground. “Everyone needs a place to go to when they fall apart,” she says. She gestures around vaguely. “This is mine.” 

“Well it’s definitely quiet,” Clint says, unable to stop the dry twist from seeping into his voice. 

Natasha laughs and lies down on the bed (only one bed, two of them). “They don’t ask questions here,” she says. “It comes in handy sometimes.”

Clint nods, because he can see the practicality in that like he can see the practicality in almost every facet of Natasha’s life, even if this wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when he wanted to run away to somewhere to recuperate. And he’s immeasurably glad of it later that night when he wakes up screaming, frantically blinking away the flashes of blue that flicker behind his eyelids, Loki’s voice ringing in his head so loudly that he doesn’t hear Natasha for a long moment, Natasha whose strong hands are shaking him, Natasha whose arms come up to wrap around him, who presses her mouth to his hairline and murmurs, “It’s okay, I know, I know, I know” like a mantra, like a prayer, and Clint knows but doesn’t know that she knows and holds on anyways, needing something to believe in.

\---

Natasha’s lying in a hospital bed back in the medical ward of what Tony keeps calling Avengers Tower when Clint and the others return back from the mission. They pulled two bullets out of her gut and she lost a lot of blood, but she’s got an IV dripping O negative blood back into her veins now and the heart monitor above her bed is beeping steadily, soothingly. She looks tired even in rest, but she’s alive and out of surgery with no complications and Clint feels something knock loose in his chest the moment he sees her, rattling around his ribcage like loose change. 

Clint stands at the glass doors of Natasha’s recovery room for a long while, just watching her, trying to figure out if he should go in and see her, trying to figure out if she would still have him after his incoherent and entirely embarrassing declaration of love. Her eyes are closed and her chest rises and falls in a regular rhythm, but Clint can tell that she’s not asleep, just a touch too much tension in her brow. Natasha’s never been good at sleeping in places with so many people rushing around all at once. 

Natasha opens her eyes after a few minutes, frowning to herself and shifting a little in the bed. She’s probably bored out of her mind, Clint thinks, restless after keeping a body that’s so used to constant movement still. Her eyes drift aimlessly around the sterile white room and eventually pick out Clint, who stills entirely when her eyes meet his. There’s a long moment that’s probably only a handful of seconds but feels like an eternity where she just stares at him, calculating, evaluating, thinking. And then she smiles, a slight thing that’s more tentative than Clint’s ever seen on her, and he finds himself smiling back without meaning to, that feeling that’s been bouncing around his chest crashing out of his ribs entirely, pushing him forward to slide the glass door open and lean carefully on the doorframe, sharing space with her but keeping his distance in case this isn’t what she wants. 

“Hey,” he says, trying to sound as casual as possible. 

There’s still a smile still pulling at Natasha’s mouth and she says quietly, “Hey.”

It’s not an invitation but it’s not a dismissal either, and Clint lingers helplessly by the door, wanting to run to her, wanting to press his mouth to hers just to taste the reality of her being alive still. Wants to and can’t. Doesn’t want to overstep more than he already has. 

“You ever going to come in or are you just going to stand there looking like a lost puppy?” Natasha says, some of her usual fire sneaking into her voice despite the exhaustion and trauma. 

Clint lets out a laugh despite himself and steps properly into the room, sliding the door closed behind him. She doesn’t stop him, so he lets himself wander over to the bed, lets himself sit down next to her, and the careful space between them stretches like the wide mouth of a canyon. Natasha’s fingers twitch where they rest in her lap. Natasha’s quiet, and Clint waits. 

“I was going to say something, you know,” Natasha says finally, vaguely. “I was going to wait until everything settled and everything stopped feeling like it was going to fall to shit at any moment. But no, you had to go and have your great big hero’s moment, you melodramatic asshole.”

The more she talks, the more a warm, breathless feeling spreads through his chest, dripping all the way down to his toes, makes him feel oddly light and giddy. 

“Yeah, well,” Clint says, his voice bursting at the seams with the excitement and sheer joy he’s never let himself feel about her, not like this, unafraid and unburdened and welcome. “I do have a knack for timing.”

Natasha smiles, and she looks down at her hands in a gesture so uncharacteristically vulnerable that it almost knocks Clint over. She presses her lips together like she wants to say something but can’t find the words.

“I don’t—I’m not very good at this,” Natasha says finally, and Clint wonders how many times in her life she’s actually tried, how many times things have fallen apart. Her voice is hesitant, like she’s afraid that Clint might be expecting more from her than what she can give. “Actually, I’m pretty much shit at it, this whole letting people in business. Trusting people.”

Clint lets out a surprised laugh and says, “Nat, come on, you know me. Do you think I’d be any better? Honestly, all I care about is that you don’t get rid of me.”

Now it’s Natasha’s turn to laugh, bright and confident and no longer unsure. “Clint, I’ve been sleeping with you for years,” she says, and there it is, the flicker of mischievousness, the ever-present glimmer to her eye that makes Clint’s breath catch in his throat. “Don’t you think that if I’d wanted to get rid of you, I’d have taken care of that by now? I never had to work with you, you know. I picked you.”

And Clint realizes with a sudden start that that’s the terrifying truth of it all, isn’t it? That’s the reason lately, his chest has been aching every time he looks at her, because their entire history has been filled with this awkward sidestepping, Clint looking the other way when Natasha’s eyes go too soft (afraid, always afraid that he was just seeing what he wanted to see), Natasha slipping out in the middle of the night so she wouldn’t have to see the blatant honesty in Clint’s expression when he woke up (too used to misplacing trust to think that anyone could see all of her and actually want to stick around). Clint thinks about the way she fusses over him when he gets hurt, stares at the delicate arrow necklace still sitting on her collarbones. He thinks about the first time he met her and wonders if he’s been thinking about her all wrong, if the look in her eyes when she spat, _Who the fuck are you?_ was more like an animal caught in a trap than a cold-hearted predator, wonders if the instinct for self preservation that’s settled deep into her bones manifested to the common eye as aloofness, as distance. 

Clint shakes his head, an amused smile spreading onto his face. Maybe, he thinks, maybe Natasha isn’t such a hard person to know anything about after all. Maybe he’s just been looking at it from the wrong angle, couldn’t see the right thing because he was standing in the wrong place to see the picture propped up in front of him like one of those holograph displays at a carnival. He wonders if he were to replay their entire history together, if he’d find that Natasha was trying to tell him something all along and he was just too dense to figure out what it was. 

“We’re a complete mess, aren’t we?” Clint says, and the word ‘we’ feels odd on his tongue but not entirely out of place. 

Natasha smiles at him, gentle like she sometimes gets in the mornings before she fully wakes up. “I don’t even know where to start,” she says, and now that Clint is looking for it, he thinks that yes, yes, here she is trying to say something she doesn’t have the words for, here’s what he’s been missing all these years.

Clint reaches out and slips his hand into hers, threading their fingers together like he can promise her more than something fraying and messy, something that’s more than likely to end in Natasha getting angry with him and throwing his coffee maker out the window. 

“You could start by saying it,” Clint says, and she shifts minutely and somehow, he knows that she gets it too. “I already had my turn, and I don’t think you want me repeating that jumble again.”

“If you don’t repeat it, I’m sure someone will,” Natasha says cheerfully, chuckling. “You did make that scintillating declaration without turning your mic off.”

Clint groans. Part of him hopes that they’ll all take pity on him and let everyone forget about it, but he’s been through enough prank wars with the lot of them to know that when handed an opportunity like this, everyone is sure to be nothing short of merciless when it comes to teasing him.

“This sucks,” Clint grumbles, which makes Natasha laugh, beautiful and bright like music. Clint scowls at her, even though he knows that his eyes are too light to pass as truly angry. “Hey, I just went and made a fool of myself in the name of love. The least you could do is return the sentiment.”

Clint half expects Natasha to just roll her eyes and deflect, say something like, _you don’t need love to make a fool of yourself_ , but instead her expression drops into something more thoughtful, and she yanks on his hand until he tips towards her so she can catch his mouth in a kiss.

“Clint Barton, you are an idiot,” she says, but her voice is fond in a way that Clint would think he’d call familiar if he hadn’t spent the past several years completely oblivious to the weight of it. She draws away just a fraction of an inch and smiles, saying quietly, like it’s something she’s jealously hoarding for just herself, “And I love you.”

**Author's Note:**

> if anyone's curious, the book that Natasha reads is _If on a winter's night a traveler_ by Italo Calvino. it's really really excellent and it's probably my favorite book of all time and I definitely recommend checking it out (there's a lovely English translation for those of us, including me, who don't know Italian).
> 
> comments are very, very appreciated!
> 
> also feel free to come find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/) if you like!


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